A paper from the Canadian Journal of Science, Mathematics and Technology Education:
Disrupting and Displacing Methodologies in STEM Education: from Engineering to Tinkering with Theory for Eco-Social Justice
It has been argued many times over the course of decades and across diverse paradigms that science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education practices-as-usual (re)produce systems of dominance: be it patriarchy, heteronormativity, white supremacy, Eurocentrism, (neo-)colonialism, able-ism, classism, labor inequity, anthropocentrism, and/or others. Thankfully, there are many who are doing the critical and creative work of (re)opening STEM education to the possibility of eco-social justice to-come through a plurality of productive approaches, orientations, and stances: anti-oppressive, anti-racist and critical race-based, decolonizing and de/colonizing, queer, Indigenous, gender-equitable, post-colonial, community-based and participatory, critical place-based, inter-species, and many more. Further, there are many examples taking richly critical and complicit stances to work within and against logics of exclusion. Yet, in doing so, many of these engagements are oft depoliticized and atheoretical practices of inclusion in ways that continue othering those formerly excluded, albeit differently…
Those are the first four sentences, and less than half the first paragraph. There are one-hundred forty one words. Polysyllabic opportunity is taken at every turn. Especially where a Social Justice meme can be invoked for the target audience.
In, well, quite a few words for four sentences, Marc Higgins, Maria F. G. Wallace and Jesse Bazzul check every identity group/victimhood box, and add “and/or others” and “and many more” for good measure. Tomorrow’s outrage groups can’t be easily identified.
This may be the clearest (partial) paragraph in the piece, since it consists primarily of lists of the oppressed and oppressions. The redundancy of “many” and “oft” in the last sentence is a minor point of confusion in a paragraph designed to be incomprehensible except to the cognoscenti. It is just a warmup for the even more intentionally obscure word smoothy to follow. Translated, that half paragraph is rendered:
“Some people we know have been saying STEM education is socially unjust for a long time. It’s a good thing those people are trying to make STEM education conform to the post-modernist assertion that we can’t really know anything. The only truth is power. Justice demands STEM education be like the ________ Studies curricula.”
I’ll admit some of that is interpretation based on understanding the code words, but we’ll get to more evidence for my poetic license below:
…the curricular inclusion of Indigenous perspectives is differentially problematic if we cannot also attend to the taken-for-granted and naturalized epistemological, ontological, and axiological commitments and enactments of what we are including perspectives into.
This sentence is probably the best example in the paper of esoteric obscurantism, as well as absolutely terrible writing even in context, but I’ll give translating it a shot:
“Including Native American mysticism in basic STEM teaching methods will not be useful if we can’t also reject the essentially Enlightment ideas of logic and rationalism. It will be doubleplus ungood if we don’t do more to make hard science “woke.””
Last example, I promise:
…There are now multiple productive exemplars which critically engage methodological processes to disrupt and displace restrictive norms which linger and lurk with/in educational research and its concepts which left unchecked (re)articulate forms of oppressive power. The space of “innocence” which serves to mask methodological power is perhaps no longer tenable for not addressing taken-for-granted referents to system which (re)produce dominance, inequity, and foreclose the space of responsibility towards one another across lines of difference and power…
The double negative is a thoughtful touch, as is “exemplar” where “example” would have done. (That’s like “utilize” instead of “use.”) “Lurk” and “mask” subtly add to the bias of the evidence free critique.
Translation:
“Lately, we see many useful examples of “critical theory” being applied to STEM research/teaching methodology. This is important in order to disrupt the oppressive power of the so-called scientific method, which pretends, by definition, it is unbiased. As we all know, that isn’t so. Maybe we’re not doing a good enough job destroying it. Such systems are bad things, because they exclude those who aren’t competent within them.”
This paper is full of coded micro-approval virtue signals, and assumes its world-view is unassailable. But, that’s not the worst problem it poses. It is part of the withering, post-modernist attack on hard science. Those who practice hard science in our educational institutions should be warned: From their Womens Studies beachhead, the post-modernists have already marched through English, Anthropology, Sociology, Geography, History, et. al.; Biology is next; Mathematics will be last, but they’re coming for you.
Hat Tip: Jordan Peterson